A thin grey pipe weaves it’s way through the coarse undergrowth of one of Kenya’s poorest regions, bringing hope where once there was only despair.

The non-descript length of plastic is the endgame for years of work helping communities emerge from crippling poverty and near starvation.

This pipe is a conduit – not just for water – but for pride, self-sufficiency and dignity.

Irrigation schemes punctuate the mission Irish aid agency Trocaire is on here – to help people help themselves.

Aid workers call it empowerment, but what that means on the ground in the harsh landscape of the Meru district in eastern Kenya is allowing people to stand on their own two feet.

It means they can feed their families and even have a little left over to pay for kids to go to school, thereby ending the cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

Joseph Ireri sits on a large rock under the baking hot sun looking out on the small parcel of land that has given him a path back from the brink.

The 38-year-old spent 10 years among the thousands of rural poor who stand precariously on the streets of Kenya’s coastal city Mombasa selling all manner of bits and pieces – from fruit to jump leads – to passing drivers.

Joseph Ireri's crop help him to earn some money for his family (Image: Justin Kernoghan/Photopress)

They are forced from their homes in the countryside for the simple reason it cannot sustain them.

Without water, the land offers only dust, forcing young men to travel to the cities in search of poorly-paid work.

Joseph says his life in Mombasa was harsh as he barely made enough money to send home to his wife and only managed to get home to visit every three months or so.

But Trocaire money has helped bring water from a river around 4km away to feed the land Joseph can now truly call home.

Where once there were rocks, now tomatoes sweet from the sun, that once left this one-and-a-half acre patch dry and lifeless, offer Joseph an opportunity to thrive.

He said: “I am less stressed about life. I can now see a future for me and my children. They can go to school and in the future I’ve plans like building a new house and even buying another bit of land for my son to work when he is older. None of this would have happened if the water had not come.”

These days Joseph travels a short distance to the market at Ishiara where he sells his tomatoes out of the back of an old wreck of an estate car he rents for the day.

Water brought by the irrigation scheme has made him his own boss, a man able to stand on his own two feet.

Our man Maurice Fitzmaurice (Image: Justin Kernoghan/Photopress)

Joseph is the success story, a tale of hope made possible thanks to water bringing life to the land. But there is still much to be done.

In the tiny village of Kamatanka, the people live remote lives and are out of touch even by Kenyan standards.

The roads that lead to this part of the world are passable only with the Toyota Land Cruisers so popular among aid workers.

Yet for people such as Teresina Karimi, it is along these roads she must walk every morning and every night carrying a 20-litre jerry can to fill with water as brown as the earth it flows through.

She lives several kilometres from the river, an arduous journey with 20 kilos on your back, especially when you live on a diet with little nutritional value and are forced to skip meals to ensure your children will eat.

The 46-year-old cuts a forlorn figure, her life shaped by hardship, dictated by weather.

Without the irrigation that has reached people like Joseph, this East African nation’s poor are at the mercy of climate change which they are unable to influence.

Extreme weather phenomena such as El Nino means drought is more frequent and not easy to predict. For Teresina it means her husband is nearly always away in the city working, while she must try to extract what little life there is from the small parcel of land they live on.

But she must do that while fetching water, then quite often heading off to do a day’s casual labour at 200 Kenyan shillings (around £1.40) a day.

That means she has less time to tend the land, and the cycle of hunger and poverty continues.

Teresina says she “dreams” of a better life where her husband will be at her side and her children will be educated and in turn able to support her when she gets old.

But the seeds of hope have been planted here with a new women’s group that is organising and starting to see what can be done. They are trying to get things like a few chickens in the area and they want to learn more about farming techniques such as terracing, which stops the rain washing away vital nutrients from the soil.

Rael Njoki, 15 (Image: Justin Kernoghan/Photopress)

Irrigation, they hope, will come soon too and with it a life they can only imagine now. In many ways the formula is simple.

In the high hills to the east of the small town of Embu, Rael Njoki is only 15 and her mother a widower.

But the little cluster of huts her family lives in is shaded by banana and passion fruit trees. Thanks to irrigation, her family can sell a large bunch of bananas for around 500 shillings, which feeds them for a month.

The passion fruit picked from the trees brings Vitamin C into their diet, a huge improvement on the porridge-like meal the poor with no water survive on.

This is the difference the money makes, the hope that flows from the pipes laid down with money donated to Trocaire over Lent and beyond.